Careers and Recruitment Expert: Lateral Moves and New Skill Sets Will Propel You Forward

“In post-recessionary Corporate America, the ladder is becoming a thing of the past. You need to think of your career in a new way, a way in which you are constantly focused on acquiring new and honing existing skill sets to remain marketable and competitive. Using Joanne Cleaver’s Career Lattice’s prescription of group-centered coaching and mentoring,

you’ll get by with a little help from your friends.”

—Alexandra Levit, author of Blind Spots: 10 Business Myths You Can’t Afford to Believe on Your New Path to Success

The traditional corporate ladder is dead. It’s been killed by a changing economy, increasing automation of job functions, and a greatly reduced workforce whose needs are anything but linear. In flattened organizations, the opportunities to move up have been removed.

All these elements add up to fewer spots to move up to – but more opportunities to move over.

For smart, talented, motivated workers, this is the best career news to emerge in a long time. Instead of following the path of predetermined corporate hierarchies, you can to design a more flexible career path which will benefit you in the long run and create more opportunities for you to expand your knowledge and your responsibilities. It’s called THE CAREER LATTICE (June, 2012; HC, $28.00), an approach to success in today’s workforce environment.

Picture climbing a rock wall – a foot here, a hand here, and up you go. This is also the strategy for the career lattice. By strategically seeking and adding key skills and knowledge sets onto your professional experience, you’ll widen your ability to move across into new positions, propelling yourself forward.

A seasoned recruitment advisor whose own career brings her face-to-face with the challenges of the current workforce climate, Joanne Cleaver advises professionals that the ability to lattice to adjacent positions will become a defining career skill. It will also be a key driver for organizations to bridge the skills gap, and to attract and develop talent.

Utilizing the lattice method of moving across rather than up, you’ll:

• Invest in the best training or continued education for your future goals;

• Make smart lateral moves now to help you make upward moves later;

• Network more strategically than ever;

• See possibilities down the road that would otherwise have escaped you.

The Lattice is both more stable and more dynamic than the linear career ladder. No matter your age or career stage, latticing equips you to make your move into emerging jobs or careers in all industries with more speed, skill, and confidence than your competitors.

THE CAREER LATTICE explains why and how you need to lattice, why this is one of the biggest emerging career and hiring trends of the next decade, and how you can use it to your professional advantage.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Joanne Cleaver has coached top employers to better recruit, retain, and deploy diverse talent. At her prompting, companies including Comcast, Time Warner, The Principal, and Avon, among many others, have restructured talent development programs, reframed recruiting and promotion tactics, and discovered fresh ways for employees to produce, lead and innovate.